We are working with Sports Science Synergy who are assisting in the fluid operations at the Brighton Marathon Weekend.

We currently use cups for fluid distribution on course, for many considered reasons:

Drinking little and often has been strongly recommended by our Medical Director and sports nutritionist. However, over-hydrating is more dangerous than becoming dehydrated. We therefore need to manage the amount of fluid we provide runners carefully. Cups allow us to distribute water more effectively along the route as we can provide smaller portions more regularly. Were we to provide water in bottles, the distance between drinks stations would be far greater.

We try to be as sustainable event as we can be, printing as little paper as possible and using as little plastics as we can. We also try to minimise the amount of fluid that is wasted. We saw huge wastage when using 500ml bottles of energy drinks and 330ml bottles of water, where runners would take a few sips and then discard the bottle.

Brighton & Hove is actually a very small city yet we manage to attract a very large amount of runners. The route is fairly narrow in places as result of the volume of runners. We believe it is a better experience for runners to run over discarded paper cups at each fluid station, rather than running over partially filled plastic bottles. Just think what 12,500 partially empty bottles would look like, and then think about running over them at the 25mile marker – not much fun! We received more complaints in 2010/11 and had more incidents when using bottles on our course than cups – this is definitely a no-win situation for an event, so we choose to go down the safest route possible.

The clean-up operation is essential for the permission of the event. In order for us to receive an event licence we need to give the city back to the community as quickly as we can after runners have passed along the route. Paper cups are much easier to collect and remove to be recycled, than plastic bottles.

Why not use pouches again?

In previous years, we used water pouches that featured a tearable strip and a squeeze mechanism, which in theory are fantastic – however feedback on these from our runner survey was negative with many runners struggling to tear the strip and choking on the water as they squeezed the pouch. We decided that runners not being able to use the pouches easily was more a hindrance than having to slow down a little to drink from a cup.

But other marathons use bottles, so why doesn't Brighton Marathon?

When people discard plastic bottles on the route in their thousands, the route becomes hazardous for runners, creating a high risk situation for tripping and sliding on the bottles. Especially in densely populated areas of the course and when people are tired during their run. Races such as London Marathon have the benefit of much wider roads (it is our capital city after all) and more space to accommodate the bottles and the clear up, which just isn't possible on some parts of our route, such as the Lanes and on the seafront. Races like the New York Marathon, which has many narrow sections, use cups exclusively along the route very successfully. Ultimately we want to provide a safe and smooth organised event. We do appreciate that runners prefer to drink from a sports capped drinks bottle, however in a large mass participation event the logistics and safety require us to use an alternative method. Drinking out of a paper cup, we hope, is a small concession to ask people to make in order to still have a fantastic experience at the Brighton Marathon or BM10k.